How a C-Leg user escaped the World Trade Center on 9/11
As usual, Curtis Grimsley was working in his office on the 70th floor of New York's World Trade Center when suddenly the floor started to rock. "I looked to the window and saw a lot of papers flying past outside," the computer expert and transfemoral amputee later told the New York Times. He immediately went to the staircase. But would he manage with his artificial leg to run all the seventy floors downwards? He did – thanks to the C-Leg, a computer-controlled lower limb prosthesis from Otto Bock HealthCare GmbH (Duderstadt/ Germany).
"For me, the C-Leg simply made the difference between life and death, because it allowed me to walk down the staircases just like an able-bodied person". With a conventional prosthesis, Curtis Grimsley probably would not have managed to escape from the inferno. Thanks to the sophisticated technology used in his prosthetic leg, he managed to get out of the building; well protected within a near shop he observed the Twin Towers tumbling down. Then he ran away from the horrible scene until an ambulance took him up and brought him to the hospital.
The C-Leg, to which Curtis Grimsley owes his life, is the first completely microprocessor-controlled leg prosthesis in the world. Its name stands for Computerized Leg – it thinks while it walks: A micro-processor in the knee joint controls both the swing phase and the stance phase of the walking cycle. The artificial knee adapts in real time to any movement, resulting in the best possible approximation to natural walking. With the approval by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in the USA in 2000, the C Leg already passed one of the strictest examinations for medical appliances of the world.
Curtis Grimsley got his C-Leg in spring 2001. The former basketball player and competition-experienced track and field athlete had lost his left leg in a car accident. For several years he had a conventional prosthesis until he heard about this German development.
For Curtis Grimsley, the C-Leg was more than worth the money, especially since the terror attack: During his escape from the tower he was able to keep up with everyone else. "I saw other, overweight people, for whom it was very hard", he remembers. "They had to step aside and rest for a while. I was tired, too, but I didn't need to stop. For me it was just like training, a long, hard workout."
